1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printer and method thereof which receives printer setting information indicative of printer driver settings corresponding to a print request, and prints the printer driving settings along with a print job corresponding to the print request.
2. Discussion of the Background
Currently, image forming apparatus such as a printer connected to a computer provide the user with many different printing features and printer configurations. For example, using a printer's properties pop-up window, a user may select a variety of printer driver settings including a printer paper source, an output paper tray, a layout setting, a collation status, a duplex setting, an orientation setting, a paper size, a scale rate, a positive or negative imaging format, font information, watermark information, coloring information, etc. After the user selects the OK push button on the printer's property pop-up window, a printer driving existing on the computer prints the print job according to the selected features.
In more detail, FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional set-up of a computer 52 and a printer 56 attached via a connection of cable, local network or Internet 54. The printer 56 includes a connection port 57 for attaching the connection of cable, local network or Internet 54 to the printer 56. Thus, a user using the computer 52 can select an item or other object to be printed on the printer 56.
FIG. 2 illustrates a block diagram of a conventional application 60 interfacing the printer 56. The conventional application 60 is hosted on an operating system 64 resident on the computer 52. When the user invokes a print command from the application 60, the document or other item to be printed is communicated to a printer driver 62. The printer driver 62 is a printer and operating system specific software interface. The operating system 64 sends signals in accordance with instructions from the printer driver 62 to the printer port and/or network card 68 via a connection 66, thus placing signals corresponding to the document or other item to be printed on the cable and/or other network 54 connected to the printer 56.
Thus, a user using the computer 52 may select a variety of different features as discussed above and the print driver 62 prints the requested print job on the printer 56 according to the selected features. In some cases, a separate front or rear sheet may be printed along with the requested print job indicating computer system information such as a name of the file and a printing time stamp, for example. However, after the printer driver 62 queues the requested print job, all of the vital printer driver settings are lost. That is, the printer driver 62 does not store this information nor print this information along with the print job.
Therefore, it is not possible for the user to view the previously set printing driver settings, which may be useful if the user forgot which tray he/she printed to, for example. Further, the printer setting information including the computer system information and the printer driver settings are important for document management, publication duplication, proof printing, pre-press (i.e., the preparation of camera-ready materials for mass industrial printing), printer software QA, printer software development, etc.
Currently, users have to actually compile the printer setting information into the document, or alternatively write down the printer setting information. Obviously, this is extremely inefficient and time consuming.